Can you tell us something about the company history of ownCloud? How did the idea emerge to create a product like ownCloud?

Holger Dyroff: „ownCloud began at a KDE community event in 2010, where Frank Karlitschek (co-founder and CTO of ownCloud Inc.) was challenged by the audience to build a secure, flexible open source alternative to DropBox. Two years, 400,000 users and three versions later — I’d say he accomplished that. It was because of the success of the project that Frank and myself formed and launched the commercial entity this past December.“

Can you briefly explain, how ownCloud works?

Holger Dyroff: „ownCloud enables universal access to files through the widely implemented WebDAV standard, providing a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks across devices while supporting sharing, viewing and editing via the web interface. Installation has minimal server requirements, doesn’t need special permissions and is quick. ownCloud is extendable via a simple, powerful API for applications. For more information, please visit: http://www.owncloud.org.“

There are several filesharing solutions out there for businesses. What is so special about ownCloud?

Holger Dyroff: „Flexibility is in our DNA. Flexibility starts with the open, modular nature of open source — both as a technology and business model. Flexibility for our partners and customers — THEY choose where they want to store the data, not us. We sell only the tools, not the storage, so we don’t compete with our partners and we don’t charge our customers unnecessary fees when they have perfectly good storage on site.“

What are your plans for the near future?

Holger Dyroff: „Well, we launch our first commercial product next week. From there we will be releasing new community and commercial versions every three months to bring businesses and end-users exciting new features. This is possible because we have an extremely active community and a very smart CTO.“